Modern Intellectual History http://journals.cambridge.org/MIH Additional services for Modern Intellectual History: Email alerts: Click here Subscriptions: Click here Commercial reprints: Click here Terms of use : Click here MASTERS IN THEIR OWN HOME OR DEFENDERS OF THE HUMAN PERSON? WOJCIECH KORFANTY, ANTI-SEMITISM, AND POLISH CHRISTIAN DEMOCRACY’S ILLIBERAL RIGHTS-TALK PIOTR H. KOSICKI Modern Intellectual History / FirstView Article / January 2015, pp 1 - 32 DOI: 10.1017/S1479244314000857, Published online: 23 January 2015 Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S1479244314000857 How to cite this article: PIOTR H. KOSICKI MASTERS IN THEIR OWN HOME OR DEFENDERS OF THE HUMAN PERSON? WOJCIECH KORFANTY, ANTI-SEMITISM, AND POLISH CHRISTIAN DEMOCRACY’S ILLIBERAL RIGHTS-TALK. Modern Intellectual History, Available on CJO 2015 doi:10.1017/S1479244314000857 Request Permissions : Click here Downloaded from http://journals.cambridge.org/MIH, IP address: 171.67.216.21 on 26 Jan 2015 Modern Intellectual History,page1 of 32 C Cambridge University Press 2015 doi:10.1017/S1479244314000857 masters in their own home or defenders of the human person? wojciech korfanty, anti-semitism, and polish christian democracy’s illiberal rights-talk∗ piotr h. kosicki Department of History, University of Maryland E-mail: [email protected] Prior to World War II, the founder and key theorist of Poland’s Christian Democratic movement—the Silesian political revolutionary Wojciech Korfanty—developed a sophisticated “Catholic rights-talk” in conversation with trends in Western European Catholic thought. In the wake of the Holocaust, however, both in ephemeral political opposition on Polish soil and in subsequent exile, Poland’s Christian Democrats abandoned their interwar rights discourse. This essay explores that shift, locating its source in interwar Polish Catholic anti-Semitism. Given the Holocaust’s perverse fulfillment of Polish Christian Democracy’s crucial 1930s advocacy of restricting the political and economic life of Poland to rights-endowed Christians—necessitating the removal of Jewish “non-persons”—the Poles’ transnational postwar advocacy vacillated between Cold War cooperation with American-aligned governments and a desire to participate in the governance of a Poland that, even if Communist, had finally become a “nationally homogeneous state.” Given the historiographical revolution of the last ten or so years in the study of twentieth-century European Catholicism, it can be difficult to balance the grand narrative of transnational Catholic modernization and Cold War engagement with crucial regional and national singularities.1 The now standard snapshot of ∗ The author thanks Duncan Kelly, Brian Porter-Szucs,˝ and the three journal reviewers for their feedback on earlier versions of this essay, as well as participants in the February 2013 New Histories of Transnational Christianity workshop at Harvard University. 1 Key works include Wolfram Kaiser, Christian Democracy and the Origins of European Union (Cambridge, 2007); Maria Mitchell, The Origins of Christian Democracy: Politics 1 2 piotr h. kosicki the liberalizing quasi-corporatism of Marshall Plan-funded, post-World War II European integration by Christian Democratic parties is no longer sufficient. There are fundamental questions to be posed in the broader European and global contexts about the Catholic stance at mid-century on an entire canon of juridical and political concepts ranging from sovereignty, to democracy, to rights (of the individual and of the person). The last of these elements is particularly problematic. Samuel Moyn has provided a breakthrough account of the emergence of a Catholic “new rights- talk” in the late 1930sandearly1940s, pegging it to the increasingly pro- democratic writings of French Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain, while also acknowledging that the premise of this Catholic rights-talk was almost always hostile to liberalism.2 There is, nonetheless, implicit in this story a liberalizing trajectory: looking back from the early twenty-first century, we recognize that Catholic rights-talk ultimately became a cornerstone of the discursive frames of Popes John XXIII, Paul VI, and John Paul II, not to mention the declarations and constitutions of the Second Vatican Council, from Gaudium et Spes to Nostra Aetate.3 However inimical the origins of Catholic rights-talk from the standpoint of our dominant conceptual framework of Enlightenment-rooted “rights of man and citizen,” the tendency remains to find a convergence between that framework and the Thomist-inspired Catholic project of protecting the dignity and rights of “human personhood.”4 That liberalizing trajectory, however, applies only to certain strains within the early Catholic rights-talk. John Connelly has documented the foundational role of anti-Judaism in Catholic salvation doctrine, as well as the anti-Semitism and racism that traditional Catholic anti-Judaism bred in interwar German-language Central Europe.5 Paul Hanebrink has incisively captured the exclusionary paradigm of “rights of the (Christian) man” that framed 1930sandWorld and Confession in Modern Germany (Ann Arbor, 2012); Samuel Moyn, “Personalism, Community, and the Origins of Human Rights,” in Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, ed., Human Rights in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, 2010), 85–106. On Catholicism in European borderlandsseeJamesE.Bjork,Neither German nor Pole: Catholicism and National Indifference in a Central European Borderland (Ann Arbor, 2008). 2 Moyn, “Personalism,” esp. 95. 3 Agostino Giovagnoli, “Karol Wojtyla and the End of the Cold War,” in Silvio Pons and Federico Romero, eds., Reinterpreting the End of the Cold War: Issues, Interpretations, Periodizations (London, 2005), 82–90. 4 By “human personhood” this article intends also that term’s semantic iterations, especially “human person” and “human personality.” 5 John Connelly, From Enemy to Brother: The Revolution in Catholic Teaching on the Jews, 1933–1965 (Cambridge, MA, 2012). masters in their own home? 3 War II-era Hungarian Catholic rights-talk despite its embrace of personalism.6 This essay will examine another Central/Eastern European case that further complicates our understanding of the Catholic rights-talk trajectory: that of Poland. To an even greater extent than in former Dual Monarchy Hungary, memory of Central and Eastern Europe’s all-too-recent imperial mosaic of multiculturalism and statelessness plagued the political culture of the Polish state resurrected in 1918 out of three 123-year-old partitions.7 Unlike Hungary, Poland soon found itself sharing its entire eastern border with Europe’s rising atheist power, the Soviet Union. When its papal nuncio from the years of the Polish–Bolshevik War of 1919–20, Achille Cardinal Ratti, was elevated to the papacy after his return to Rome, he gave his full support not to Poland’s budding Christian Democratic movement, rooted in the regions of Pomerania and Silesia, but instead to the political movement of non-Communist socialists rallying around Poland’s war hero, Marshal Jozef´ Piłsudski. An anti-Russian, agnostic ex-revolutionary, Piłsudski sought to establish a multiconfessional, multicultural Polish state in which Jews, Ukrainians, and Germans would share in civic life with their Catholic counterparts.8 It was Piłsudski’s anti-Bolshevism that proved decisive in obtaining Pius XI’s long- term support for his political camp, consisting first of socialists, then—following his May 1926 coup d’´etat—the so-called Sanacja (meaning “cure” in Polish), to which he entrusted his dictatorial powers. In parallel with Sanacja flourished also National Democracy, born in the Russian partition of Poland in the 1880s and grown by its most influential theorist, Roman Dmowski, into a mass movement of antiliberal, anti-Semitic, anti-German nationalists.9 Having achieved a significant grassroots presence in all three partitions prior to World War I, National Democracy remained the choice of parish priests and bishops alike in villages and towns across independent Poland. Dmowski participated in the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, and alongside Piłsudski he gained an almost mythical status in the Polish political imaginary that has long outlasted his death in 1939. Between the Holy See’s support for Piłsudski and the long-standing National Democratic sympathies of Polish clergy, Christian Democracy found itself 6 Paul A. Hanebrink, In Defense of Christian Hungary: Religion, Nationalism, and Antisemitism, 1890–1944 (Ithaca, NY, 2006), esp. 170–92. 7 On the partitions see Piotr S. Wandycz, The Lands of Partitioned Poland, 1795–1918 (Seattle, 1974). 8 Andrzej Garlicki, J´ozef Piłsudski, 1867–1935, trans. John Coutouvidis (Brookfield, 1995). 9 On National Democracy’s origins see Brian Porter, When Nationalism Began to Hate: Imagining Modern Politics in Nineteenth-Century Poland (Oxford, 2000). 4 piotr h. kosicki marginalized from its inception. Shared ideas and political constituencies— in the German partition, its future leaders, especially Wojciech Korfanty, had been considered leading National Democrats10—made it difficult for Christian Democracy to take on Dmowski’s masses. At the same time, particularly after Piłsudski’s coup, the Sanacja’s entrenchment in power and starkly different notions of Polish nationhood made it an easy target for Christian Democratic ire. Indeed, the otherwise unlikely alliance between Piłsudski and the Holy See ultimately drove interwar Polish Christian Democracy toward a rights-talk predicated